Ethnography

ETHNOGRAPHY

From the Greek: Ethnos “foreigner:” graphos “writing.” Ethnography, “writing about others.”

“… doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, ‘thick description’.” (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p.6)

“Ethnography is an ambiguous term, representing both a process and a product. As a product an ethnography is usually a book.” (Michael H. Agar, The Professional Stranger p.1) Ethnography gained popularity as a research methodology among the Victorian anthropologists who used it as an “excuse for empire.” By adapting Darwin’s theory of biological evolution to culture it was held that all cultures evolved from a state of primitive barbarism into a civilised, technological state of being. Which is to say that the English empire was the pinnacle of achievement. Armed with this theory Victorian anthropologists went into the “field” to study the natives who had not yet evolved in order to better understand the mechanism. Thus the ethnographer was always Western, highly educated and travelled to foreign realms to conduct ethnography.

“A dearly held assumption is that field notes are data and reflect what “really” happened. We trust that quotation marks reveal words that have been truly spoken. This is often an illusion…
“In such situations, we become playwrights, reconstructing a scene for the insight of our readers, depicting ongoing events in our minds (Bartlett 1932): turning near-fictions into claims of fact.” (Gary Alan Fine, “Ten Lies of Ethnography”, The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22 (1993): p.277)

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From the Greek: Ethnos “foreigner:” graphos “writing.” Ethnography, “writing about others.”
“… doing ethnography is establishing rapport, selecting informants, transcribing texts, taking genealogies, mapping fields, keeping a diary, and so on. But it is not these things, techniques and received procedures, that define the enterprise. What defines it is the kind of intellectual effort it is: an elaborate venture in, to borrow a notion from Gilbert Ryle, ‘thick description’.” (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, p.6)
“Ethnography is an ambiguous term, representing both a process and a product. As a product an ethnography is usually a book.” (Michael H. Agar, The Professional Stranger p.1)	Ethnography gained popularity as a research methodology among the Victorian anthropologists who used it as an “excuse for empire.” By adapting Darwin’s theory of biological evolution to culture it was held that all cultures evolved from a state of primitive barbarism into a civilised, technological state of being. Which is to say that the English empire was the pinnacle of achievement. Armed with this theory Victorian anthropologists went into the “field” to study the natives who had not yet evolved in order to better understand the mechanism. Thus the ethnographer was always Western, highly educated and travelled to foreign realms to conduct ethnography.
“A dearly held assumption is that field notes are data and reflect what “really” happened. We trust that quotation marks reveal words that have been truly spoken. This is often an illusion… “In such situations, we become playwrights, reconstructing a scene for the insight of our readers, depicting ongoing events in our minds (Bartlett 1932): turning near-fictions into claims of fact.” (Gary Alan Fine, “Ten Lies of Ethnography”, The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22 (1993): p.277)